The New Year is upon us and I have come up with my practice aspiration for the first few months of 2010.
What is your aspiration?
What is your aspiration?
Some keys to coming up with a practice aspiration are to figure out what support you currently have and make an aspiration based around that support. Also, it may be helpful to write your aspiration down so you can look at it daily to keep yourself on track.
Sometimes jumping into a commitment with high expectations, without the support to help lift you up and keep you there, you'll simply fall back down and enter into defeat. Also, an aspiration to practice needs to involve some aspect of practice in the creation of it. In fact, the aspiration may come as a result of your practice.
My aspiration is really pretty simple. I will probably sit more than twenty minutes a day and much of that sitting could be done in my college courses. Two of them involve a twenty minute period of sitting meditation. This semester I will also be participating in several weekend meditation intensives/trainings. I also live in a contemplative household that requires us to sit during the group sitting period, either in the morning or evening, for at least ten minutes two times a week. And, I have several sitting meditation groups I am connected to in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition around town.
What I've noticed is that as I engage in class, at home and in my personal practice especially these last few weeks which have been particularly challenging for me, I lean toward the practice more and more. There is almost a yearning for a deeper commitment because it feels like a refuge for me, something that is helping sustain my fortitude and resilience. Even though I have been in a lot of pain the last few weeks (emotional and spiritual mostly) there really isn't a lot of suffering, not the sort of suffering that would have brought me to the practice in the first place.
It is interesting to watch how my relationship with my practice has changed, shifted and oscillated throughout the years. I remember clearly how challenging it was at first to sit with myself. There were only brief periods where I could sit still long enough to feel any result from the sitting. Then as I became more confident in the practice and art of sitting and walking meditation, as I found support through attending retreats, weekly practice evenings with local groups and made friends with teachers and other practitioners on the path, the practice seemed to grow with me. I was then able to sit longer and to stay with present moment awareness of experiences longer.
The power to stay is really important. It is really the foundation and art of the practice. If you can't stay, you can't feel—you can't get in touch with reality. But if you learn to sit still within the storm of feelings, sensation, thoughts and consciousness itself, then the truth begins to be revealed and your true aspiration comes forward. True aspiration is not something you've created with the effort to create something, but is created out of the effort you put into staying and allowing obscurations such as boredom, doubt and fear to drop away.
Nowadays, my life is my practice. I have gone through periods of sitting a whole lot in the day--several hours at a time. I have gone through periods of not practicing at all--just living life or attempting to--and diving head-first into both sufferings and joys. And what has happened just recently, I feel, is a deconstruction of what practice is to me. It is almost like beginning anew, starting fresh with the business of sitting meditation and mindfulness in daily life. These must always be new. They must always be available in an intrinsically, organic way.
I would like to present a practice I call "Resting at Your Edge."
I would like to present a practice I call "Resting at Your Edge."
Imagine you have climbed a mountain. You have climbed several hours in order to get to the top--the view is magnificent. 360 degrees—all around you are the tops of trees and snow covered peaks. Standing high at 8500 feet above sea level, the air is fresh and the sun shines down upon you, warming you as if from the inside out. You look in front of you at several huge boulders resting at the edge of the cliff, ready to fall, but supporting each other enough so that they probably won't fall anytime soon. You go to the boulders and climb up upon their smooth, cool surfaces. You look over the edge toward the snow-dusted plains several thousand feet below you. Your hands begin to clam, your heart beats a little faster and your legs freeze then thaw to jelly. All in an instant you pull yourself back, you look away. But then, something inspires you to look again. Your face illuminates in a determination to see. You want to see what you have looked away from. Not the view, the landscape of the earth, but the feeling itself, the inclination to not see.
So you turn your body toward the view. You turn your mind toward the feeling. Your attention is at once on the sensations you experience in the body, the view of the landscape, the distance from your body on top of the boulders and the earth several thousand feet below. And there is nothing between you and the vastness of sky all around. You ask yourself, "What is this? Where am I? What am I doing here?"
You've reached your edge. In fact the whole journey has been to meet this edge. As you were hiking toward the pinnacle, talking yourself up the mountain, you thought maybe it was to see the view, to get to the top and to take a picture of yourself up there and to show yourself and the world--your friends and family, and maybe the people who read your blog--that you did it. But there was something else too. There was something inside of you that wanted the edge, to look over the impossible, to meet the impossible and to sit there, to rest there, to stay--vigilant, silent and aware.
What is the Practice of "Resting at Your Edge?"
The practice is to sit as if you are sitting at the edge of a cliff looking over the edge. Experience what it is to be on the edge. One thing about this edge is that you will have to keep on moving to find it. The moving, really, is being present. The movement is really a manner of beingness, of experiencing. The body remains breathing, the habit energy of moving this or that body part consciously, relaxes. You are driven by awakening, the realization that there is an experience calling you, wanting you to be still, silent and aware.
So in sitting practice find your edge, move until you find it. Walk, sit, run, dance, stir until there is an edge to look over. Look over your edge and see where there is a compulsion to look away. Look away if you have to then check back in. See if there is enough support both internally and externally to look back toward the edge, to move your body toward it, to make a seat there, to sit and stay there. Make a seat there at that spot, in that experience of wanting to look away but refusing to from the inside out and sit. Let your attention move with the sensations of your body as it is experiencing the moment. Let your attention move with the feelings that arise with the experience. Let your mind stay with the moment of meeting your edge, that place where you never imagined you'd have enough courage to be. Stay at that edge and invite it into you. Let yourself experience how it is to be fearless in the presence of fear, in the presence of obstructions, in the presence of doubt, uncertainty and inhibition.
What is it like to live at the edge? What is it like to sit there and peer into the experience of this moment? Experience your edge with abandon. Abandon all perceiving, all convention and become what you are experiencing. Experience, experience in its rawness--naked and unperturbed. Let the experience ravage who you think you are. Do nothing but be aware. Do nothing but listen with awareness. Do nothing but return, return, return and keep on returning to that place of innocence, nudity and simplicity of vision.
What if you are new to sitting meditation?
The newer you are to sitting meditation the better. Suzuki Roshi called it beginner's mind. There was a time I was just starting out and could call myself a beginner and really mean it. Then I practiced more a more and became a practitioner with experience. Sooner or later I thought I was enlightened, and thought enlightenment had something to do with experience and coming up with answers to all of life's quandaries. Now I am like a fool, dancing in defeat, awakened to a potential of undiscovered delight. I am jarred awake to the newness of practice, and have begun yet another inquiry into what sitting is, what mindfulness is and what delight is all about. This is the beginner's mind. It is that place that knows nothing--it is like the archetypal fool who in his unawareness, in his complete beingness in the moment, dances over the side of a cliff.
There is so much to learn through practice, and there is also so much to unlearn. The knowing of oneself is sometimes illusory. Self is always changing: our views, our relating, even the cells of our body--they never stay still. So the practitioner in order to stay fresh, must water beginner's mind. The practitioner must remain with life and bring their entire being with them to meet the edge of life--where life is constantly being made, where each step is right up against the edge of nothing, nowhere fast. One step too quick you'll fall over, one step back you'll fall behind. But this moment where life is being created, this is the present moment. And for the practice it is always new, never the same sequence, never the same application of technique, never the same technique and never the same body and mind to be present with.
What if you don’t feel like practice is calling you?
If you are just starting to meditate, you have no basis, really, of what the practice can do for you—other than what you may have heard from friends or read in books. So the first thing for first-time meditators is to simply do the sitting, the walking and begin applying mindfulness to your everyday life. Some teachers recommend doing sitting meditation even when you don’t feel like sitting and that is somewhat of a complicated task. In my opinion, sitting meditation isn’t always the right thing to do. Sometimes the right thing to do would be to get up and go to work, eat dinner or talk to a friend. But in the early stages it is important to remember the practice is there for you. Build a foundation in your sitting and walking meditation. Become used to taking refuge in that space.
Secondly, if you have been sitting for awhile and your practice is getting stale—try bringing the practice more into your life. Then, let your life inspire your sitting and walking. Bring your life to your cushion. That’s the most important thing. Begin to infuse your beingness with the refuge of meditation. Begin by inviting the world into your practice space. Somewhere in the comfort of sitting meditation—blissed-out, peaced-out you may have forgotten what life is. Maybe suffering doesn’t find you there. Maybe you are not available to it. Or maybe you have not much suffering and don’t feel like sitting because sitting is only for contemplating suffering—be with that too. Unless your life comes with you to the cushion, the awarenesses you come to on your cushion will not make it to your everyday life.
What is the distinction between practice and daily life?
Depending on how you have trained, it may be less or more challenging to awaken in your daily life. Daily life encompasses everything: the transitions, the events, the non-events, the thoughts, the feelings, the sensations and even the meditation itself. Meditation is part of daily life. Sometimes no practice is the best practice of all, because it is the practice that is most available to you. It is where all the times of sitting and walking meditation bear fruit.
So if you are now at a space of wanting not to practice, just simply lie in the sun and let the magic and simplicity of your time living on this beautiful planet nourish you. Essentially, for a practitioner with experience, any experience at all is the practice. The application of attention, the readiness of body and mind, and the still, open tenderness of a heart exposed is an enlightened experience, is meditation in its rawest, purest and richest form.
Simply living your life with honesty, integrity and character is the best form of medicine for all circumstances in life. There is no truer response to anger, oppression and expressions of emotion and behavior of any kind than the responses you have already made, and the responses you offer right now. Being with yours and others’ humanness is the deepest aspiration.
Blessings to you, in this New Year. With warmth and gratitude,
Brian
Brian
©2010 Brian Kimmel.
